In a dark wood, a light falls on a young girl who is laying in an old iron bedstead, the kind that could be found in an 18th century hospital. The girl is surrounded by seven people, girls and boys of different ages. There is one woman who is holding the hand of a little boy who is staring up at her. His, being the only gaze that is directed toward another. There is a whisper of expectation in this moment. What are we waiting for? Is she sleeping? Why has she folded her hands on her stomach? She is dressed in red, the color of energy and blood, and her face is both peaceful and concerned. Isn’t it almost time to wake up?

In 2005 the Swedish government conducted an investigation regarding the “apathetic refugee children.” This was an alarming series of cases in the media and elsewhere, in which refugee children seemed to be completely indifferent and couldn’t get out of bed. Some argued that it was feigned indifference, while other’s named it as an expected effect of traumatic experiences in their home country that were followed by the bureaucratic nightmare surrounding residence permits and deportations once they got to Sweden. ”Indifferent refugee children” are my own association regarding an artwork that captured my interest the first time that I saw it in stream of socialmedia posts. The painting is called ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and it aroused national attention when the school that had commissioned the work, as part of a public art instillation, chose to take the painting down. Why? The school suspected that the painting could lead to impulses of self-mutilation among the students. I was, apparently, not alone in making associations to the work’s themes.

In the end there was a compromise; the artwork was installed in the school’s library. An appropriate place, one could say. There are many stories hidden in a library, books and sagas that could even be related to this work, Sleeping Beauty.

Sleeping Beauty slept for one hundred years. She slept because she pricked her finger on a thorn, exactly as the evil witch had predicted. Soon, there grew around her a thicket of roses, champions tried in vain to penetrate this forest, but only one made it through, kissed the sleeping princess and was granted her true love.

Archetypes are useful, they fare well throughout time. Many of these archetypes appear in the subjects of Markus Åkesson’s work. These are subjects that most of us can relate to, they play on our imaginations and take stage in the world of our dreams. Sleeping Beauty is the english name of the Swedish ‘Törnrosa,’ a saga that begs questions of purity, innocence and true love. Universal, existential quandaries that individuals and communities wrestle with, posing interesting questions to the world of education. How then, could the school be so doubtful of the work they commissioned when it was delivered?

A DARK WOOD

In the beginning, in the moments of the commission’s conception, “the forest” was a key part of the subject for the painting that would be made for the Swedish school. The forest is an often recurring allegori in the culture surrounding knowledge and education. I had just initiated the work of writing this text when I received the invitation to the fall semester’s first parent-teacher conference at my child’s school. The meeting began in the school’s crowded cafeteria. Placed around the room were reading tablets all donning the same image, a picture of a forest. The teachers who welcomed us had their own tablets with the same picture on them and it was soon time for the school’s principal to speak. She shared thoughts on knowledge and academic development. She used, in support of this, the image of a forest. “The pursuit of knowledge is akin to walking through a wood one doesn’t know,” she said. “To wander off the path and find oneself in an unfamiliar place. To then, step just a little farther away from the trail.”

A girl is standing in a room with showcases. One can almost guess the temperature of the room, the air is presumably cool and dry. The girl bares a mask, the mask bares likeness to a skeleton. In her mask the girl’s face becomes almost animalistic, a figurinne trapped in a carnal sadness. The painting is named Psychopomp Club (In front of the cabinet), the same girl can be met in another painting of the same series, Psychopomp Club (Hen Skeleton) but in that space the show-cabinet has become the foreground. Inside of the cabinet, layers of glass, reinforce the notion that one is merely and observer, a bystander who examines another bystander. Inside the cabinet sits an anatomical model of a brain.

ÅKESSON, AND THE MASK THAT HIDES AND TRANSFORMS

The mask is a symbol that many of us recognize. We find it often as a reoccurring phenomenon in art and literature. The mask that hides and transforms. It moves through our fantasies. In the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges’ book, Fictions, there is a short story in which a mask plays a central roll. The story portrays the horror of a nightmare with exact precision. In a mirror Borges sees himself baring a mask. What lies behind? Who? Is there a difference between the face we see in the dream and the face we see in the mirror, the mirror which reflects another pectoral interpretation of ourselves?

Is it the adult world’s mask that the child is wearing in the series ‘Psychopomp Club?’ The child’s facial expression under the mask is a serious one, somber and maybe even mournful. Still, is the sobriety of the work, just a filter through which only I am interpreting the painting? Again, the artist is toying with our imagination and fantasy. He is locking us into our own inner-journey. This is where there are likenesses between Åkesson’s suggestive imagery and the world of film. As an example, the acclaimed film director, Lars von Trier, is often criticized for what appears to be manipulation in his dramatization and characterization. We are prompted to feel Selmas anguish in the film Dancer in the Dark. We suffer alongside Bess who offers herself in Breaking the Waves. In Melancholia, we can follow along Justine’s mental escape in depression’s ghastly but sobering landscape. Melancholia is, quite generally speaking, a film which portrays an aesthetic akin to Markus Åkesson’s visual world. In Melancholia, we find direct references to the work of the pre-Raphaelites, a type of artistic expression from the middle of the 1800’s, who, in a classical motif of beauty and death practiced an almost spiritual approach to the then modern interpretations of a physical world being then, as now, often rigidly academic.

SPIRITUAL TRACES IN PATTERN AND FORM

Who, then, are the pre-raphaelites? In England in the year 1848 three artists, John Evert Millais, Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti formed The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB.) The rather obscure name, comes from the Renaissance’s “Rafael” – Millais, Hunt and Rossetti wanted to return to a spirit in art that existed before Rafael and Michelangelo, especially the 1400’s painting styles. The Pre-raphaelites reveled in details and analytics of prodigious nature, but also had a strong communal engagement that permeated through their art. The core group came to consist of seven artists but many more worked in the same spirit. In Markus Åkesson’s paintings, we find both the richness in detail and the meditation over existential issues and perceptions. Dead, and often taxidermied animals, or animals that have found themselves to be in the wrong place, like in a family’s living room, that lock our gaze into the picture. The paintings, however, are not caught in stillness. The paintings capture a motion that has frozen, both in the depiction of the embalmed animal and in the exchange of the child’s gaze.

LET US RETURN TO THE PAINTING SLEEPING BEAUTY.

It is interesting enough that the motif depicted in the painting was, partially, commissioned by the school. The school had asked for a dark wood. Markus Åkesson comes from Småland. His studio lies in a small community called Nybro. Nybro is covered in forest. It is, as a place, the epitome of Småland. The Swedish architectural standards that line every street, quaint places of service within an arms length, and therefore the traffic points outward towards the larger towns Växjö and Kalmar. The Kingdom of Glass with its hotshops and the rest of the glass industry’s industrial architecture, stately and majestic ”workplaces” waiting for the tourists to come and see. Behind there, stands the forest, vast and impossible, in the flat landscape, to pinpoint a horizon. There is a tightness in Markus Åkesson’s painting. The motif is close and detailed, it is as if your gaze or your camera locked in to a certain kind of pattern or how the light meets and highlights a certain body part, a neck, a finger, the tip of a nose, a rosy cheek. Sleeping Beauty tells a larger story, but the story is a mosaic built of smaller images; the knotted roots navigating the feet of the trees, dried branches that contrast moss growing over stone. And there among the sticks and stones are the bodies standing and the bodies waiting, creating the same wholeness.